Will the India gambit be worth it?

MSNBC is reporting that India and the United States have reached a nuclear deal: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Bush on Thursday announced an agreement on a landmark nuclear deal, a breakthrough for the Bush administration as the president made his first visit to India. Under the accord, elusive until the last minute, the United States would share American nuclear know-how and fuel with India to help power its fast-growing economy. The move represents a major policy shift for the United States, which imposed temporary sanctions on India in 1998 after it conducted nuclear tests. India insists it has been a good steward of nuclear material for decades; that there has never been one incident of proliferation from it. The pact marks a major breakthrough for New Delhi, long treated as a nuclear pariah by the world, as it allows it to access American atomic technology and fuel to meet its soaring energy needs ? provided the U.S. Congress gives its approval. Although India did not agree to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty ? which met with nationalist resistance in the massive South Asian nation ? it did agree to oversight of its civilian program. Here's a link to the White House's fact sheet on the Indo-American strategic partnership. To be honest, it's not clear to me from the reportage how this is different from what was reported back in July plus a repackaging of pre-existing commitments. Fred Kaplan is not thrilled with the deal, mostly because he thinks Bush is steamrolling a lot of foreign policy actors in the process: One could make a case that the trade-off is worth it?that the benefits of a grand alliance with India more than compensate for the costs of exempting India from the NPT's restraint clauses. India is not going to disarm, anyway; it has agreed, as part of the deal, to open its civilian reactors (though not its military ones) to international inspectors and safeguards; it's better, one could say, to impose some controls than none at all. But a few things are worth noting. First, the United States has no authority to grant such an exemption on its own. The NPT is a treaty signed by 187 nations; it is enforced by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and it is, in effect, administered by the five nations that the treaty recognizes as nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France). This point is not a legal nicety. If the United States can cut a separate deal with India, what is to prevent China or Russia from doing the same with Pakistan or Iran? If India demands special treatment on the grounds that it's a stable democracy, what is to keep Japan, Brazil, or Germany from picking up on the precedent? Second, the India deal would violate not just international agreements but also several U.S. laws regulating the export of nuclear materials. In other words, an American president who sought to make this deal would, or should, detect a myriad of political actors that might protest or block it?mainly the U.N. Security Council, the Nuclear Suppliers' Group, and the U.S. Congress. Not just as a legal principle but also as a practical consideration, these actors must be notified, cajoled, mollified, or otherwise bargained with if the deal has a chance of coming to life. The amazing thing is, President Bush just went ahead and made the pledge, without so much as the pretense of consultation?as if all these actors, with their prerogatives over treaties and laws (to say nothing of their concerns for very real dilemmas), didn't exist.I still think that this is the right deal to make. If I had to make Bush's case to the rest of the world, I'd say, "Look, there's no way India is going to renounce their weapons, and if you lived in their neighborhood you wouldn't either. That said, they've agreed to open up their civilian nuclear program up to outside oversight, and they haven't aided or abetted anyone else's weapons program. So this deal acknowledges that the genie is out of the bottle in New Delhi, but keeps the bottle closed for everyone else." I'll entertain objections to this position in the comments.